Who’s Buying J. Crew’s New XXXS Clothes?

At first, the new clothing sizes that J. Crew established in May—000 and XXXS—seem to send an outrageous message to women. Pants in this size fit a twenty-three-inch waist; the average American woman measures thirty-seven-and-a-half inches. The shopping blog Racked described the triple zero as “a whole new level of crazy.” The celebrity chef Rachael Ray called it “the silliest, most asinine thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” A Facebook commenter wrote, “Finally, something I can wear. On my arm.”

What’s happening at J. Crew can be difficult for Americans to grasp: as the U.S. has become a less attractive place to open stores, retail isn’t solely about their needs anymore. The triple-zero and extra-extra-extra-small clothing is not designed for the average shopper in Houston, Miami, or even Manhattan. Instead, J. Crew said that the sizes are a response to the requests of petite Asian customers, particularly at its new stores in Hong Kong, who had trouble finding Pixie pants and boyfriend jeans that fit them.

American pundits reported J.Crew’s explanation, but many of them immediately discounted it. They shouldn’t. As I wrote in March, opportunities to build stores in the U.S. are dwindling. So J. Crew and many other chains, along with mall developers, are turning to Asia. Abercrombie & Fitch and Old Navy recently opened their first stores in mainland China; Victoria’s Secret plans to do the same later this year. “China is our primary growth driver and will be our company’s focus for the next decade,” an Abercrombie executive toldAd Age. Eventually, the company said, Abercrombie may open more than a hundred stores there. Hong Kong, where J. Crew opened two stores in May, has become one of the most desirable retail markets worldwide.

There may be a limit to the number of U.S. companies that can keep growing in Asia.Luxury sales have slowed recently in Hong Kong, and too many stores may now be competing for the same shoppers. Still, for some American brands that have become passé here, Asian customers—many of them newly wealthy and less fatigued by ubiquitous logos—are viewed as a second chance. Juicy Couture, known for its jaunty velour tracksuits a decade ago, is closing all its U.S. stores but expanding in Asia; later, it hopes to relaunch at home with a new image.

New Asian millionaires, along with their counterparts in Russia and the Middle East, have also revived the couture business. At Chanel’s haute-couture show in Paris last week, the front row included the Korean pop singer CL, the Korean-Australian actress Jung Ryeo-won, the Taiwanese actress Gwei Lun-Mei, and Angelica Cheung, the editor-in-chief of Vogue China, whose dark bob mimics Anna Wintour’s. (Vogue China is published by Condé Nast, the New Yorker’s parent company, in partnership with China Pictorial.) “Our sizes typically run big, and the Asia market runs small,” a J. Crew spokeswoman said. She noted that the triple zero—available online and in the Hong Kong stores—makes up the smallest proportion of its sales.

Critics of the triple zero have reason to be sensitive about the issue of size in women’s clothing. Since the size zero, and then the double zero, first appeared in stores, feminists have pointed out that pro-eating-disorder groups idealize it. “It signifies the desire to be so small, you can simply disappear, be nothing, fade into zero-ness,” Samantha Escobar wrote for the Web site the Gloss. Studies have found correlations between exposure to a very thin (and often Photoshopped) ideal in the media and dissatisfaction with one’s own body and eating disorders. Margaret Atwood captured the relationship between size and sexual politics in her 1969 novel “The Edible Woman,” in which the narrator, recently engaged, gradually loses her desire to eat and fears that she is being consumed; the beginning of the cocktail party to celebrate her engagement is described as “zero hour.”

Yet even the definition of a zero isn’t as fixed as one might think. As retailers expand globally, one challenge they face is that sizes don’t translate easily from one market to another. J. Crew’s size chart shows that a U.S. triple zero is the equivalent of a zero in the U.K., a twenty-eight in France, and a one in Japan. (The largest U.S. size available is a twenty, or XXL.) Even within the U.S., sizes vary from brand to brand.

This wasn’t always so. The United States used to have a consistent sizing system, and it looks nothing like the one brands use today. Kathleen Fasanella, a professional patternmaker and consultant who has written prolifically about women’s sizing, told me that what we call a sixteen today was once “a pretty small size.” (When people claim that Marilyn Monroe wore a size sixteen, that doesn’t mean what they think it means; estimates put her in the equivalent of a size four to eight today.) According to Fasanella, women’s sizes once corresponded to the markings on an L-square, or tailor’s square, a tool used by patternmakers to determine scale. But customers didn’t find the system intuitive, so retailers pressured manufacturers to move away from it. The National Bureau of Standards studied women’s body measurements, calculating such variables as “abdominal extension” and “bust point to bust point,” relying heavily on a study of fifteen thousand women conducted between 1939 and 1940. In 1958, the bureau designated clothing sizes in even numbers from eight to thirty-eight, with a plus symbol for fuller-hipped women and a minus symbol for slender figures. As women became larger, though, the standards became less relevant. In the nineteen-eighties, the system was eliminated.

Fasanella told me that the notion of “vanity sizing”—whereby retailers deliberately increase the measurements of each clothing size so that women feel better about the number on the tag and therefore spend more—is a myth, at least as it’s usually described. Because Americans have gotten heavier over time, retailers have had to adjust their sizes upward to keep their “medium,” which today corresponds to a size eight or ten in the U.S., as the most popular size. (To use fabric efficiently, Fasanella said, “you should be selling two mediums for every small and every large.”) If your weight has remained constant over many years, you might wear a smaller size today than you did ten years ago.

J. Crew’s development of new sizes to serve Asian customers makes good business sense, and it is no less arbitrary than most other sizing standards. Someday, it might be logical for retailers to converge on a single, international size chart—but it doesn’t seem likely. Americans enjoy being outliers, and we never did manage to adopt the metric system.